Secret Valve Gamepad Prototype Found in a Second-Hand Store

At a Goodwill thrift store in the US, a prototype of the Steam Controller with the codename Chell was discovered — a gamepad that Valve had been developing several years before the final version launched in 2015.

The prototype is named after Chell — the silent protagonist of the Portal duology. Visually, the device is radically different from the familiar gamepad: two large circular trackpads sit on the sides, and between them is a raised central section with a mesh texture, surrounded by four main buttons — Y, B, X, and A. According to Valve's engineers, this layout was meant to make navigation in PC games easier, but in practice, it turned out to be extremely unergonomic. The unnatural button placement clashed with muscle memory, so the concept was quickly scrapped. A small batch of Chell units was still produced for internal testing, and individual specimens occasionally show up on the secondary market.

The new owner admitted that, as a teenager, he missed the peak of Valve's activity, and finds like this are a real way for him to connect with the company's history. The controller was recognized without issue in Steam as a standard retail version. The four central buttons emulate stick input, so you can play with it — albeit with some caveats. The owner himself noted that the prototype falls short of the production model, but he's thrilled to add it to his collection.

Interestingly, about four years ago, another user bought a Chell unit on eBay and tested the device extensively across several titles. At the time, that owner claimed that the prototype's trackpads actually felt better to him than the retail version's in terms of haptics, though calling such a controller suitable for comfortably tackling serious games would be a stretch.

The retail Steam Controller from 2015 kept the two trackpads but adopted a more traditional button layout, although Valve, for reasons unknown, left only one analog stick. By 2026, the company has significantly overhauled its approach to hardware: a few months ago, a new edition of the Steam Controller hit the shelves, featuring two full-size sticks, trackpads shifted downward, and a classic D-pad. At the same time, Valve launched the Steam Machine, which already has people lining up for it. Against this backdrop, the early Chell prototype comes across as a curious artifact from a different era — a time when Valve was still actively feeling out the perfect shape for a PC gamepad.

Would you want to try out a controller with two large trackpads and a central button cluster, or do you think that layout was doomed from the start? Share your thoughts in the comments.